Tag Archives: collaboration

Our students in the Idea Hive are currently working on collaborative presentations. This means that groups have been formed with some kids from Snow Lake and some from Wingham in each. The trouble has been working between the research space and the presentation space. Google docs has chatrooms that we use all of the time. Our kids are well experienced in chatting through a learning sequence, working out group roles and solving problems that way. Unfortunately, google presentations has never had a simple chatroom to work in while you are doing the actual editing of a presentation. You could chat while the presentation is being presented, but not while planning. This was causing us some difficulties as kids jumped back and forth between different spaces.

That has now changed.

An update to google docs has changed this so a chatroom (and other new presentation options as well) now exists. But the chatroom and new options only exists if you update your document settings. A few steps to this.

Step One:

Step Two (and three)

and that’s all there is to it. This will give you a chatroom in presentation editor mode – but only on new presentations that are created after you update your settings. It will also give you more editing options for the presentations themselves. One more step up for this tool.

Thanks to the students from Wingham who discovered this today and passed it along to their teachers…

Last year Heather and I worked through a process of researching and then reading a book with our grade seven and eight classes that was a new way of doing things. Building our community and then moving the kids closer together, we had our students use a number of platforms (wordpress blogs, google docs, chatrooms, online sticky notes, etc) to conduct a lot of research in online spaces.

While we definitely did a lot of planning ahead of time, when the rubber actually hit the road, things often changed and we found ourselves inventing new practices on the fly; taking the time to reflect on things afterwards, we grew a pedagogy of students working in community, on multiple platforms, to accomplish a variety of goals.

I was reminded about the power of what we did and the changes we had to make personally when I had a student teacher in my room for a few classes. She was in while the students in our class were deep into writing the Field Guide to Molching that formed a pivotal part of our work with Markus Zusak’s novel The Book Thief. At that time, Heather and I were often spending 50+ minutes each day in dead silent classrooms while 10+ groups of students each on their own google doc furiously researched and wrote. We found ourselves jumping in between chatrooms, supporting students in their learning, asking critical questions, editing along side of students and providing additional information when needed. The speed at which we worked was simply something I took for granted. But when a student teacher came for a few days to see what we were doing out of interest, I had to coach her along and get her working at a much higher speed then she was used to. It made me realize that we were doing things differently.

I have been reminded about that over the last few days. Once again, Heather and I have teamed up to begin reading a book between our classes. Eventually, we are going to be taking turns reading over skype, while the kids write in a chatroom and then spend some time in reflection at the end of each session. But before then, the kids need to do some background research and initial learning. The book we are reading is Half Brother, written by Canadian author Kenneth Oppel. A great book (based on a true story) about a family in the 1970s who attempt to raise a chimpanzee as if it were a human child. We wanted our students to look at such things as sign language, animal research, the theory of evolution and other topics as background work.

So we’ve set them to work.

Groups of four or five students each have a google document as a planning space. Each group has students from Heather’s school and students from mine. They are collaborating on planning, doing their research, and then heading towards the completion of a presentation which they will deliver to both classes.

But we’ve been amazed the last few days at what we are finding between our groups of students. Heather and I both have classes that have students in grade seven and eight in them. This means that our grade eights were with us last year as we worked through The Book Thief, while our sevens are rookies to this kind of work. We were amazed and impressed at the maturity and experience that many of our eights brought to this task. They quickly jumped in, organized themselves and the grade sevens, asked questions freely in chatrooms and set up research sub titles and guiding questions on their documents. From the intense experience they were through last year, they know what to do and the process they need to work through in order to be effective learners in online spaces.

I am interested to see where the grade eights progress to as they gain more experience working this way. I am also wondering how the guidance that the grade eight students provide to the grade sevens will help them to get up to speed with this type of learning. Last year we were all rookies building and learning as we went along. What happens when mentors come in to play?

As one of my grade eight students told me when I spoke to them about this after today’s session, “That’s right Mr. Fisher, we’ve got skillz.”

We’re into final exams in our school. Today, the kids in my class wrote their ELA (English Language Arts) final.

I always like to ask the students questions related to blogging and working online. This year’s exam was no different. As I have in the past, I had a question on the exam that asked the students how they felt about publishing our work to the world.

“How do you feel about producing media for a public audience? Does it make things different knowing that the things you produce will be placed online for anyone around the world to enjoy compared to just keeping them in the classroom?”

As in the past when I’ve asked a question like this, there was a variety of answers. A number of students commented on being nervous about this, of being unsure of how people would react to their productions. A lot of students said they were motivated to do their best work by this happening. While encouraged by these answers, none of them were new. I had heard these things before. What was interesting on this exam was the number of students who answered this question by saying that they felt sharing their work online was the default option. They mentioned things they had put online throughout the school year both in the classroom and outside. Sharing their stuff was what they expected.

I also asked them a question about the writing that we did for our Field Guide to Molching. Completed with Heather Durnin’s class in Ontario using a whole variety of technologies, the students worked together over google docs to write an 85 page book. The question on this project read:

“Did you think the quality of the writing in the Field Guide is better or worse because of it being written by groups together in google docs?”

Once again, the students were overwhelmingly positive about the experience, but a few different answers stood out. For example, one of the students wrote:

“It was great working in groups this way. One of the best parts was that those people who were good writers in each group could focus on that. Others could research and feed them information in the chatroom. Together, BAM, the project just seemed to come together because everyone was doing what they were best at.”

I love that BAM. I think it tells a whole story on it’s own.

More and more I hear this kind of stuff from students. Working with people around the world is motivating and interesting; but it’s becoming the default; just the way things are done. It’s the way they expect to work.

We’ve been spending a lot of time lately writing in my classroom. Along with our thinwalled partner class in Wingham Ontario, we are spending 45 minutes to an hour each day trying to figure out what writing can be when the tools change.

One of the defining features of writing has always been the solitary nature of the task. One person sits down in a quiet room (or a crowded classroom) and spends a few minutes (or a few years) completing a task. The solitary nature of writing can be a frustration for students, and for teachers trying to help students improve their skills.

In the Idea Hive we read the novel The Book Thief over Skype. What we’ve been doing is writing a field guide to the town of Molching, the main setting of the novel. The students came up with several dozen people, places, events, etc from the book that all needed research and explanation. Once this brainstorming was finished, they chose their own groups and dove into writing.

Each day at the assigned time, the students sign into their google docs account and meet their partners in the chatroom. They usually spend a few minutes catching up from yesterday, talking about the weather, what they did last night, or their plans for the day. After this, they start working. While different groups have had different methods, it has been common that one or two students (out of 4 in a group – two from Snow Lake and two from Wingham) actually write the document. The other students may be off researching the topic and bringing information back and post it in the chatroom or their notes on the document itself. Depending on where they are in the process, other students may be working on editing and revising paragraphs that had previously been written. While this is happening, a constant chatter takes place in the chatroom. Students talk about revisions and edits that are needed. They talk about possibilities for inclusion or exclusion. They look at the writing from an organizational point of view, talking about pieces and paragraphs that need to be moved to other places in the piece. All of this happens while Heather and I jump between chatrooms, switching between groups, offering help and guidance for the process as it is happening.

Overall, the main feature of writing this way has been collaboration. Students have to work together, to question, to bring new content to the document and to solve conflicts as they arise. We have kept a document between our classrooms that is called Knowledge Care. Occasionally, we will have students add their thoughts to it, focussing on techniques for solving conflicts, for working as effective group members and for helping others to write effectively. We refer back to this with our classes when things need sorting out.

It has been fascinating to work with students like this. As teachers we have been able to deeply immerse ourselves in the writing process; watching students write, revise and edit as they do it – live. We can interact with them, offering guidance and advice as they are working. As a veteran teacher of writing, I have learned a lot about how students write that I simply never had access to in the past – a window like this into their thought processes. Teachers often only see pieces of writing as they are completed (or as specific parts are completed), but with google docs, a chatroom and a group of students, we can instead offer guidance as pieces are being written; the true meaning of formative assessment.

Talking with my students about this process, they feel the pieces of writing they are completing are much better written then anything they could have completed alone. They have said that while they sometimes feel frustrated by group members or by the speed of the process (getting consensus from four group members obviously makes things move at a slower speed then a single student writing alone), they understand fully the value that is added to the process by having multiple people working on a single document. They have wondered about moving to groups of two instead of four and of having more specific roles assigned to group members (both legitimate suggestions) but overall, this process has been excellent for their skills. One student went as far to tell me last week that when he is writing alone now, he feels lonely and misses the added voices to help him along in the process.

In the end, we plan on publishing our Field Guide to Molching online and on paper using a service like lulu.com so that all of the students can have a copy of what they have accomplished together.

I’ve been involved with online projects for a good number of years now. I’ve followed and gawked at dozens more.

In many of them I’ve been amazed at the creativity and great ideas that have grown. For others, (to be honest) I’ve wondered why teachers have spent the time on them.

Lately I’ve been noticing more of a pattern emerge from these projects though: the hugest majority of them are based around language arts and social studies. This isn’t a secret. I’ll admit that I did notice this a few years ago, but in the light of reports like this one recently released by the Royal Society, I am getting more concerned about this.

Knowledge, Networks and Nations is a report concerned with the changing nature of scientific development and advancement. Networked, collaborative and global, scientific developments are more and more dependent upon the ability of scientists to work with others located around the world. This post by George Siemens has a good overview of the report and the state of science innovation around the globe.

Now admit it. I will. As a classroom teacher, when we look to collaborate with others around the world, we often think first of projects that circle around language arts and social studies. These subjects allow us to use tools we are familiar with. We blog with others. We leave comments. We have skype calls to read a book together. We use wikis to collect our research on a city. We take pictures, radio plays and produce videos with others.

But the tools we use are neutral. We can just as easily be blogging about math problems as about a novel we are reading. But mostly, we aren’t. Science and math tend to the red – headed step children of international K – 12 collaboration. When working with someone else, we always say that these two are difficult to integrate (or something along those lines) and promise to get to it later. Later often never comes. After years of showing the possibilities of international collaboration, the power of projects and the excitement they generate; are we spending our time with the low hanging fruit? Are we taking the easy way out?

In light of the fact that many of our students will be heading into fields where science and math are the core of what they do with their working lives, and that science and math are becoming much more global in dynamic in their purpose, we should be searching much harder to undertake real research possibilities with the kids in our classrooms. We need to understand how working online with science and math projects are both similar and different from humanities based projects.

What are these similarities and differences?

I can’t tell you. I haven’t done enough online work with my kids in the science fields to know.

As I write this, a massive earthquake has recently taken place in Japan, followed by a tsunami only hours ago. It has recently passed the Hawaiian islands and is still headed for the Pacific coast of North America.

As my class of grade seven and eight students came in this AM I started with this video:

Many of them had heard early reports at home about this and a few of them had obviously watched the news. We discussed the fact that the tsunami was still moving and predictions were being made about where it might hit next and the possible damage.

We had a discussion in class about how the web was changing to allow us access to real time news. We talked about things like hashtags and realtime searches. We discussed the effect of Youtube and flickr on this sort of breaking news culture. Someone found the Wikipedia page of this event and was amazed to see the breadth and detail of it. At that point it had already been edited over 500 times.

Earlier I had posted on twitter about this event and my teaching partner, Heather Durnin was online even though her school was having a snow day. Heather agreed to take part in a skype call from home and emailed her students (who were also at home) about the fact that we were going to be working on a document to collect as much current, breaking information on this event as we could. So a quick skype call later, students from my class and some kids from Heather’s class (who were at home remember, having a snow day) logged on to a single shared google doc and collected information, updates, questions and predictions about the long term impact this might have. A quickly moving chatroom flowed by and Heather and I chimed in clarifying points with students, suggesting things for them to look up and posing questions for them.

In the end, we ended up with this document. While many of the early facts on this will change, be proven wrong, and be updated as the news from the situation around the Pacific is clarified, this was a great experience for students as they learned about real time news online, the power of the web, and collaboration in action.

My school division this week is hosting a conference for it’s school committee members. These are the elected officials from the 47 (?) schools in our division who, along with the principal, sit as an advisory board at each school site.

My class and I were asked to skype in to this conference to talk about how we use technology. To add a bit “zing” to our presentation, while we were conducting the live call, they also set up another screen at the conference site and watch as kids from both classes in the Idea Hive dropped their thoughts on a wall about using technology in the classroom.

” I think working on computers changes work from what people want to avoid, to something people can’t wait for!”

“It is important to have technology in the classroom, so that we, the students, can communicate with people all over the world…”

“I think that having technology in classrooms is good because it helps us learn new things, like how to connect to people all over the world. It lets us communicate by texts or by skype.”

“We live in a global community that the whole world is a part of on the Internet. What we do in class gives us the knowledge and the experience that we will need to work in this global community.”

We see (once again) that this really isn’t about the technology at all. While we couldn’t do the things we do without it, the network and the connection is where the value is. This is true even if you’re 12 -14.

The kids in Heather Durnin’s classroom and mine have started blogging and this week we will bring these kids together in the beginnings of full community.

While our photo contest will run until later in the week, we have also have had the students in our classes beginning to learn about blogging. They have written posts introducing themselves and have also completed an interests survey. Using Google Forms, Heather created a detailed survey asking all of our students about their likes, dislikes, fears, future plans and interests. Every student completed this survey and then, using the magic of google docs, the results were shared with them. Each student spent some time with the results of this survey, looking for similarities and differences between the two classes. They were then required to write a blog post about what they found.

As well as finding out a great many things about the classmates in their 2 700 km across classroom, many of them showed their excitement about this collaboration:

“Two classes are coming together to make one giant hive and they are all buzzing with ideas.”

“The Idea hive is buzzing with excitement as we begin our year together. Every one in the idea hive filled out a survey about our interests. I have more in common with the Idea Hive then I thought!”

“I can`t wait to see what Mrs.Durnin and Mr. Fisher have in store for the Idea Hive class and what we will be writing about next.”

Bringing learners together in common spaces, helping them to build trust with each other and having some fun are essential parts of building a learning community. Taking chances with your learning does not happen without these shared experiences first. The next step is building up some buzz and excitement. We want our students to be excited and interested in this collaboration. By keeping the energy high, our students will be motivated to collaborate and eager to learn more about one another.

We have a further set of contacts scheduled. Beginning tomorrow we are putting our classrooms together in another skype call to teach the students about commenting – an essential skill and one that needs to be actively taught and modelled in a classroom blogging community. After this, we will begin our first set of assignments together, drawing our classrooms together through common content, readings and projects.

On Thursday my class in Snow Lake had our first Skype call of the year on our second day of school. We skyped with Heather Durnin‘s class in Wingham ON. (Heather is a plpeep btw…)

Today our call was simply to connect our two classes and let our kids meet for the first time. Because this will be the first of many. Heather and I have hooked our classes up for the long haul this year. We are working with the thinwalls model. Thinwalled classrooms are different than traditional collaborations. In most globally collaborative models, students are hooked together with other classes for what I call “the sprint.” In the sprint we pull our kids together for six or eight weeks so they can complete a unit together. We spend our time praying that things don’t break down and we ask our principal’s for exceptions to be made to filtering policies and for websites to be opened up. We hold it together for the duration and then when the unit is over we go back to the way things were. Just when our kids are getting good at communicating globally and working in teams, the experience ends.

In a thinwalled classroom, you are in it for the long haul. We plan on having our students hooked together as one class for the entire school year. Our classroom blog will list all of the kids from both classrooms as one. They will be grouped together to complete assignments, to read novels and to blog. We have a few lessons planned already that we are going to be teaching both classes over skype and we will be reading a book aloud to both classes.Bringing our classes ever close together, the plan is to bring the students into daily contact with each other.

Thinwalls is about living openly and honestly with another teacher and another class, even though they may be far away. Heather and I have had to be open and honest with each other about ourselves, our styles and about the challenges we face.

Our students are already interested in the similarities and differences between our two spaces. Although we both live in smaller rural places, Heather lives in a place that is mainly supported by farming and is fairly close to urban areas whereas where I live is more isolated and supported by mining. It’s also interesting (and slightly strange) to note that although I have been using technology in my classroom for a number of years and worked with people from around the globe – this is the first time I’ve worked with someone from within my own country.

We will have a lot to share as we move forward about what we’re doing and how we do it. The tools we are using are available to all for no cost to very low cost (a pro flickr account – $25, for example). More important than that is the changes to our pedagogies we are working on to support learning in these ways.

Quote of the day from Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus:
“The hothouse environment of a collaborative circle can make the ideas and achievements of the participants develop faster than if the participants were were all pursuing individual goals without sharing.”